(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Yours truly weighs in on the bloat fest!
Even More Bloat!
August 23, 2010
1 Comment | 
higher education | Tagged: Administrative Bloat at American Universities, Brian Kisida, Goldwater Institute, Jay P. Greene, Jonathan Mills, Matthew Ladner | 
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
Burke and Ladner Sing the real “Empire State of Mind” Duet on NRO
June 9, 2010
Now you’re in New York FLOR-I-DA! Our minority children outscore your WHOLE STATE! There’s nothing we can’t do!
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
The Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke and I hit National Review Online on Florida’s K-12 success in raising minority academic achievement.
In California, Meg Whitman won the Republican nomination for governor in overwhelming fashion on Tuesday. As you can see on her campaign site, Whitman wants to bring Florida reforms to California, which desperately needs them. California is a gigantic state that scores like an urban school district on NAEP. Without large improvements in California, it is unlikely that we will see the United States even begin to close the academic gap with European and Asian nations.
3 Comments | competitive effects, instructional reform, vouchers | Tagged: Goldwater Institute, Heritage Foundation, Lindsey Burke, Matthew Ladner, National Review Online | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Public Education and its Enemies
October 29, 2009
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
In the final scene of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the French sue for peace after Henry’s triumph at Agincourt. While the French king is away negotiating the final terms, Henry uses the opportunity to woo the King’s daughter Katherine to become his Queen.
Katherine is cool to this idea, but slowly warms to the notion under the glare of Henry’s charm. Finally, she asks “May it be possible zat I should love zee enemy of France?”
Henry replies:
“No Kate, it is not possible. For in loving me, you shall love the friend of France. For I love France so much that I will not part with a village of it.”
I think of this line often when K-12 reactionaries try to play the “well, I support public education” card. This you see, is supposed to put a reformer on a defensive and get them to scramble to say that they support public education too!!!
Nice try, but for my part, I have this to say: don’t tell me how much you love public schools unless you are willing to do what it takes to make them work for kids.
Yesterday Marcus Winters released a study showing that charter schools in NYC improve public school performance, especially for disadvantaged children. The effect sizes were modest, but what more can you expect given that the state still has a cap for the number of charters? The cap should be removed, and private choice options created.
Research has firmly established that ineffective teachers severely harm the education of children. Who is the enemy of public education- those who want to preserve tenure at all costs, or those who want to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom?
Last year, I was at a conference in Arizona. A philanthropist spoke movingly about the need to raise Arizona academic standards to internationally competitive levels. An assistant Superintendent of a tony school district said “We can’t meet the standards we have now, the last thing we should do is raise them.”
Who is the enemy of public education- the philanthropist or the administrator?
Later in that same meeting, I made a presentation about Florida’s success in improving public education, including the curtailment of social promotion to compel literacy training. One of the educators in the audience replied “I don’t want to see 9 year olds rolling on the ground crying because they don’t get to advance with their grade.”
That, you see, would be inconveint to her. It would be much less messy to simply pass the child along illiterate until he or she drops out in the 8th grade.
Who is the enemy of public education- me or her?
The reactionaries cleverly try to equate pouring more money on this broken system as compassionate. Balderdash. It is the goals of public education that people should be committed to, not any particular delivery mechanism, nor the employment interests of the adults working in the all-to-often dysfunctional system. We’ve tried the pour money method for improving public schools, and it failed miserably.
Show me don’t tell me how much you love public schools, apologists. As your critics multiply across ideological lines, the time has come to put up or shut up. I love public schools so much that I am willing to put in the right incentives and policies to make them work for a far larger number of children.
How about you?
2 Comments | politics | Tagged: Emma Thompson, Henry V, Kenneth Branagh, Marcus Winters, Matthew Ladner | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
The Price of Things to Come: Free
September 24, 2009
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
I am half way through Chris Andersen’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price and I can already recommend the book.
Andersen’s treatment of disruptive technologies and firms is simply fascinating. Craig’s List, for example, has from one perspective “destroyed” far more profits for newspapers than it creates for itself. The entire firm runs on a few dozen employees, but has played a large role in reducing a huge revenue stream for the entire American newspaper industry.
Craig’s List actually hasn’t destroyed profits, but in fact has redistributed them to the general public. Craig’s List provides a superior service to a want ad, and it is almost always free.
Likewise, Britannica and others used to make large profits going door to door selling $1,000 encyclopedia sets. Then Microsoft came out with a $99 dvd encyclopedia, and profits withered. Then Wikipedia came along and Microsoft abandoned their dvd project, and Britannica and company will be required to reinvent themselves if they are to survive.
Technology is driving all of these changes-exponential increases in computing power, storage capacity, are driving changes that are fundamentally disrupting several industries: music, newspapers, and perhaps banking.
The question I have half way through this book: who will become the Google of higher education?
Google has a core business of showing you online ads that is very, very profitable. Most of what they do, however, is throwing out products for free. Google has over 100 free software applications online- maps, Earth, documents, etc. and develops new ones all the time.
Highly successful American universities seem to have a core mission of educating students. This however is questionable at best. Some of these universities have endowments so large that if they simply followed the rules for non-profits and spent 5% of their endowment per year, they could eliminate tuition for their students entirely.
What these universities are really about, of course, is getting research grants and adding to their endowments. What if, however, one or more of them were to go down the road of truly seeking to educate the world by putting up entire degree programs online for free.
A Harvard, Princeton or Notre Dame is likely to always have more applicants than spaces, and in any case, these places could survive without students, not that they will ever need to do so. Why not put up entire rigorous degree programs online, and invite anyone and everyone in the world to complete them for free?
Concerned that it would lessen a regular degree? Pshaw-distinguish it from a regular degree, and require an exit exam, say the GRE, that indicates the student knows quite a bit. Random half-baked idea alert, but if a score on the GRE high enough to admit the student in the upper half of graduate programs were required, we’d know far more about the online student than the traditional ones.
Worried about quality? You should be, but don’t forget the recent U.S. Department of Education study showing that technology based learning is substantially more effective than the old fashioned way.
Imagine if students in Bangladesh could earn a Princeton math degree, or a theology degree from Notre Dame for free, or more accurately for the time, computer and internet cost. The marginal players of the American academy would squeal as they are forced to reinvent themselves from making buggy whips, but this is a small price to pay for bringing opportunity to the world.
The only question in my mind is how long it will be until an elite player has the necessary vision to defect from the comfortable cartel. Several universities have the means to do this, and could receive philanthropic help to do so. Attention Oxford and Cambridge: it wouldn’t require an American university to pull this off. A British university could put out a low-cost version of this, and unlike their American counterparts, they aren’t swimming in resources.
14 Comments | economics, higher education | Tagged: Chris Andersen, Free: the Future of a Radical Price, Matthew Ladner | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Mourning Constitutional- OK kids score even worse than AZ
September 17, 2009
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Regular JPGB readers will recall that the Goldwater Institute gave a version of the United States Citizenship Test to Arizona high school students, only to learn that they were profoundly ignorant regarding American government, history and geography. Only 3.5% of Arizona public school students got six or more questions correct, the passing threshold for immigrants.
The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs wanted to know how Oklahoma high school students would fare on the exam- so we surveyed them and gave them precisely the same set of questions we asked Arizona students.
Perhaps I ought not to have been so hard on Arizona students. After all, they passed at a rate that was 25% higher than their peers in Oklahoma!
That’s right: the passing rate for Oklahoma high school students was 2.8%. They somehow underperformed Arizona’s already abysmally pathetic performance.
My favorite part of writing this paper was poking around in the Oklahoma state standards for civics. Here’s a quote:
Oklahoma schools teach social studies in Kindergarten through Grade 12. … However it is presented, social studies as a field of study incorporates many disciplines in an integrated fashion, and is designed to promote civic competence. Civic competence is the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required of students to be able to assume ‘the office of citizen,’ as Thomas Jefferson called it.
A social studies education encourages and enables each student to acquire a core of basic knowledge, an arsenal of useful skills, and a way of thinking drawn from many academic disciplines. Thus equipped, students are prepared to become informed, contributing, and participating citizens in this democratic republic, the United States of America.
That all sounds swell, except for the part where despite being taught social studies from K-12, Oklahoma high school students come out knowing about as much about American history and government as they know about Quantum Physics or ancient Sanskrit.
These kids wouldn’t do much worse if the pollster asked them questions in Sanskrit instead of English. The pollster would say “I am going to ask you some questions about American civics in Sanskrit. Answer as best you can. Question 1: संस्कृता वाक् संस्कृता वाक् संस्कृता वाक् संस्कृता वाक् ?”
There is some small chance they would answer “George Washington” after all.
I have an empty metal coffee pot in my office marked “Sweden Civics Survey Fund.” Please drop by a give what you can afford. Once it gets to a couple of thousand bucks, I’ll retain the pollster to give this exact same survey on AMERICAN civics to high school students in Sweden.
They couldn’t do much worse than the kids in Arizona and Oklahoma. Sadly, I suspect they would do much better.
(Edited for Clarity)
14 Comments | civic values | Tagged: Matthew Ladner, Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, Oklahoma high school citizenship test | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Texas has nothing to learn from California except…
July 10, 2009
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Interesting article from the Economist on California vs. Texas: America’s future.
I’ve been an Economist reader for 20 years now, and their work is usually outstanding. They do however occassionally fall prey to an easy stereotype, and this article contains such a folly.
Read the article for yourself, but keep in mind that Texas has among the highest NAEP scores for Hispanic students in the nation (now edged out by Florida on 4th grade reading) and spends over $10,000 per child per year.
The only thing Texas has to learn from California is what not to do.
P.S.
This has been a settled question on the only true field of battle for some time now.
1 Comment | economics, politics | Tagged: Matthew Ladner, Texas vs. California, The Economist | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Freedom from Responsibility Preview part Deux
June 25, 2009
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free.
-Edward Gibbon
Last week we had our first sneak peak at Freedom from Responsibility.
Today, more details about the results. The Goldwater Institute randomly drew 10 questions from the United States citzenship exam item bank. We hired a survey firm to interview a sample of both Arizona public and private school high school students.
The questions for neither the citizenship test nor our survey were multiple choice. When you are asked “Who was the first President?” you must answer “Washington” in order to receive credit. Applicants for citizenship must get six out of the ten questions correct to pass. A recent trial of a slightly reformatted exam found that 92.4% of citizenship applicants passed the test on the first try.
Charles N. Quigley, writing for the Progressive Policy Institute, explained the critical nature of civic knowledge:
From this nation’s earliest days, leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams recognized that even the well-designed institutions are not sufficient to maintain a free society. Ultimately, a vibrant democracy must rely on the knowledge, skill, and virtues of its citizens and their elected officials. Education that imparts that knowledge and skill and fosters those virtues is essential to the preservation andimprovement of American constitutional democracy and civic life.
Paul D. Houston, the executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, also put the issue in focus:
If you look back in history, you will find the core mission of public education in America was to create places of civic virtue for our children and for our society. As education undergoes the rigors of re-examination and the need for reinvention, it is crucial to remember that the key role of public schools is to preserve democracy and, that as battered as we might be, our mission is central to the future of this country.
Here are the 10 questions randomly selected, and their answers:
1.What is the supreme law of the land?Answer: The Constitution
2. What do we call the first 10 amendments to the Constitution?
Answer: the Bill of Rights
3. What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?
Answer: Senate and House
4. How many Justices are on the Supreme Court?
Answer: Nine
5. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
Answer: Jefferson
6. What ocean is on the East Coast of the United States?
Answer: Atlantic
7. What are the two major political parties in the United States?
Answer: Democratic and Republican
8. We elect a U.S. Senator for how many years?Answer: Six
9 . Who was the first President of the United States?Answer: Washington
10. Who is in charge of the Executive Branch?Answer: The President
A majority of Arizona public high school students got only one of these questions correct, with 58% correctly identifying the Atlantic Ocean as being off the east coast of the United States, with 42% unable to do so. It was all downhill from there. 29.5% of students identified the Constitution as the supreme law of the land, 25% of students identified the Bill or Rights as the first 10 amendments to the Constitution (12% said they were called “The Constitution” and 16% “The Declaration of Independence.”)
Twenty three percent of Arizona public high schoolers identified the House and Senate as the chambers of Congress. Nine point four percent that the Supreme Court has nine justices. Only 25% of students correctly identified Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence. An almost majority of 49.6 percent identified the two major political parties, only 14.5% answered that Senators are elected for six year terms. Finally, only 26.5% of students correctly identified George Washington was the first President. Other guesses included John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Barack Obama.
Only 26% could identify the President as being in charge of the Executive Branch. All in all, only 3.5% of public school students passed the test by getting six or more items correct. That’s 40 students out of a sample of 1,134 district students.
There were no major differences in performance based on grade (Seniors did approximately as poorly as Freshmen) nor by ethnicity. Profound ignorance is quite equally distributed in large measure across students in the public school system.
Two obvious questions to ask: is it fair to give this test? In order to answer, I examined the Arizona state standards for 8th grade social studies, which all or nearly all of these students will have taken. These standards are included as an Appendix in the study. What they show is that students are supposed to have learned about John Locke, the Mayflower Compact, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, Checks and Balances, Seperation of Powers, etc. etc. etc.
Everything they ought to have needed, in other words, to have passed this test. If, that is, they had actually learned any of that material in practice, which they obviously did not.
Second, I gave the test to my own 1st and 2nd grade sons. They both got 3 answers correct. We’ll be working on that. In so doing, they outscored about 40% of the Arizona high school sample, and tied or exceeded about 60 percent.
Charter school kids performed far better but still terribly- with a passing rate about twice as high as the public school kids. Private school students passed at a rate four times higher, which ultimately is both much better and still pathetic.
I had a very difficult time writing a conclusion to this study. More on that for the next post, but you tell me: if you were an Arizona lawmaker what would you do about this?
28 Comments | civic values | Tagged: civic knowledge, Edward Gibbon, Freedom from Responsibility, Goldwater Institute, High school civic knowledge, Matthew Ladner | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Teasing Out Freedom from Responsibility
June 19, 2009
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
I have a new study coming out from the Goldwater Institute called Freedom from Responsibility: A Survey of Civic Knowledge Among Arizona High School Students. You dear reader get a special sneak-peak!
This study employs a straightforward methodology: we designed a telephone survey instrument to test civic knowledge based upon the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) exam items. The USCIS administers a test to all immigrants applying for citizenship and makes the questions public.
USCIS officials choose 10 questions out of the item bank of 100 questions and give them as a citizenship exam. In order to pass, the applicant for citizenship must answer six out of the 10 questions correctly. The questions are not multiple choice, instead requiring applicants to supply an answer. When they ask “Who wrote the Declaration of Independence” the applicant has to answer “Thomas Jefferson” in order to get the question correct.
Recently, the USCIS had 6,000 citizenship applicants pilot a newer version of this test. The agency reported a 92.4 percent passing rate for the test among citizenship applicants on the first try. I did not expect Arizona high school students to do that well of course, given that those seeking citizenship have had the opportunity to prepare for the test. On the other hand, Arizona high school students have some advantages of their own: multiple courses in American history and social studies, hopefully exposure to American history outside of school, etc.
I randomly selected 10 of the USCIS questions and included them in a survey, curious to see how many high school students would pass the test required of immigrants.
Here’s your free sample: One of the questions was “What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?” How many high school students attending public schools answered correctly?
“I don’t know” beat “the Bill of Rights” by almost a two to one margin, and 75% of students got the question wrong.
Notice also that 12% of Arizona students thought that the first ten amendments to the Constitution were called “The Constitution.”
Phoenix, we have a problem…
21 Comments | civic values | Tagged: Goldwater Institute, High school civic knowledge, Matthew Ladner | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Rock Star Pay for Rock Star Teachers Part Trois
May 7, 2009
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
A few months ago I got an angry email from an Arizona teacher claiming that her school had been terribly underfunded, and that she had 32 students in her classroom. I wrote to her:
If you have 32 children in your classroom, my first question is what is your school district doing with all of that revenue?
The JLBC put the statewide spending per pupil in Arizona at $9,399. A classroom of 32 at the statewide average would mean $300,768 in revenue from the students in your class.
Her response:
1-teacher, 1ELL teacher, 1 Special ED teacher, reading specialist, principal, janitor, secretaries, music, art, PE, computer teacher, Cafeteria workers, Para-educators, paper, textbooks, hands on science materials, Computers (this is the 21st century learning) building up keep, electricity, water, tables, chairs , etc…..
She forgot to mention administrative salaries from central command. There is one tiny little problem with all of this. According to the 2007 NAEP, 44 percent of Arizona 4th Graders scored BELOW BASIC in reading.
In other words, as Dr. Phil likes to say, how’s that hiring your average teacher from the bottom third of university students and supplementing them with crowds of others working out for you?
Shape up people!
The sad reality of American public education is that our schools have become revenue and employment maximizers that all too often are profoundly unfocused on the bottom line: student learning. Public schools ought not to be jobs programs, but focused on their mission of equipping students with the academic skills necessary for success in life.
So, if you’ve got $300,000 in revenue from a classroom (many states have more) call me crazy, but I think you’ve got $100,000 for what research shows to be going away the most important factor for student learning gains: a high quality teacher. When I say a high quality teacher, I mean a verified high quality teacher whose student learning gains are being tracked over time by both administrators and parents on a continuous basis.
The best platforms for ongoing value added assessment are web-based data products that allow teachers to develop common assessment items based on state standards. If there are state standards for a subject, you can do value added analysis on it. When schools really get going on this, they give monthly assessments. This gives ongoing assessment data that greatly drops the amount of error (using only state tests, some of the pioneering value added models require 3 years worth of data).
Overall, it isn’t very hard to imagine a system that would improve upon the status-quo in these practices. We can no longer in good conscience socially organize our efforts to teach children to read along the lines of: let’s hire an army of people who want job security and summers off , do absolutely nothing to reward merit, and hope for the best.
This must change, and it will change.
8 Comments | teacher pay, teacher quality | Tagged: Goldwater Institute, Matthew Ladner, teacher pay, value added assessment | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
“Forward” our Motto?
April 29, 2009(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
The MacIver Institute, Wisconsin’s new think-tank, released a report today by yours truly comparing the NAEP scores of Wisconsin and Florida. Let’s just say that UW-Madison would have probably fared better against the national champion Florida Gators in football last year.
Florida spends considerably less per student than Wisconsin and has a student profile considerably more challenging. Despite that fact, Florida surpassed Wisconsin overall on 4th grade reading (although within the margin of error) on 4th Grade Reading scores in 2007.
Most impressively, this gain was driven by much larger gains among traditionally underperforming student groups. The figure above shows the progress among Free and Reduced lunch kids in Florida and Wisconsin. In 1998, Florida’s low-income students were an average of 13 points behind their peers in Wisconsin. In 2007 however they had raced 8 points ahead.
Among African American students, Florida and Wisconsin once shared space near the bottom in reading achievement. Wisconsin is still there. Florida’s African Americans students now outscore their peers in Wisconsin by 17 points.
One finds the same pattern among children with disabilities. In 1998, Wisconsin students with disabilities scored 18 points higher than those in Florida. In 2007, it was 4 points lower.
The problem isn’t that Wisconsin’s scores are low, it is that they are flat. When the Fordham Foundation found that Wisconsin had the lowest NCLB standards in the country it hinted that the state had not been vigorous in pursuit of broad K-12 reform.
Wisconsin of course was a trailblazer in parental choice with the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. The learner has surpassed the master however with two statewide parental choice programs- one for low-income children, and one for children with disabilities. If anyone can explain why a low-income child in Milwaukee deserves an opportunity to attend a private school, but a similar child in Racine does not, I’d love to hear why. Florida also has a stronger charter school law.
Rather than sporting the lowest NCLB standards in the country, Florida doggedly pursued top-down accountability with the FCAT and grading schools A to F, and creating real consequences for school failure.
Florida embraced genuine alternative teacher certification, Wisconsin has not.
I am open to correction by my Cheesehead friends, but my distant view from the far-away desert leads me to wonder if Wisconsin may have become complacent when it comes to education reform. Coasting on their demographics, avoiding the tough calls and controversy necessary to improve public schools.
If so, perhaps inspiration can be drawn from the state song:
On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!
Grand old Badger State!
We, thy loyal sons and daughters,
Hail thee, good and great.
On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!
Champion of the right,
“Forward”, our motto,
God will give thee might!
Time will tell whether progressive Wisconsin will take this lying down. Will “Forward” or “comfortably stalled” be a better fitting motto for Wisconin in the next decade?
3 Comments | school accountability, vouchers | Tagged: MacIver Institute, Matthew Ladner | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
